Events

Wednesday, July 2 2014

Asian and Pacific Americans make up more than 5 percent of the U.S. population – over 17 million people – and those numbers are growing. In the first exhibition of its kind, the Smithsonian Institution explores how Asian Pacific Americans have shaped and been shaped by our nation’s history.

The humble apron gets a fascinating re-evaluation in this traveling exhibit of 51 vintage and contemporary kitchen aprons that are both utilitarian and works of art. Featuring aprons from as early as 1900, the exhibit chronicles changing attitudes toward women and domestic work and presents aprons as vehicles for self-expression.

For more than a century, the Kansas City Stockyards fed a nation hungry for fresh meat. The heyday of the stockyards is long gone, undermined by flood, environmental concerns, and shifting economics. But this powerful financial engine is celebrated in Cowtown: History of the Kansas City Stockyards, a new exhibition of photographs, blueprints, drawings, and documents culled from more than 5,000 items retrieved from a Livestock Exchange Building storeroom in 2008.

Hixon transformed the field of portrait photography in Kansas City and the surrounding region during a career that spanned more than seven decades. His studios—the first in the Brady Building at 11th and Main Streets, and the second just one block west in the Baltimore Hotel—welcomed thousands of patrons throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

Central Library’s ESL classes are small, with excellent one-on-one
help in areas of conversation, pronunciation, grammar, math, and
American life. Classes are free and parking in the Library's garage is free for ESL students.

Former Kansas City Star columnist Bill Tammeus takes a Fourth of July week look at how our nation has been shaped by people he calls “Middle Americans” – citizens who came after the so-called “Greatest Generation” and who were often born in the Midwest.

Drawing on his new book, Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans, Tammeus will point to what we can celebrate about the achievements of Midwesterners and to what they haven’t done so well. Midwesterners contributed to — and accommodated themselves to — astonishing change in the last 70-plus years. But what legacy are they leaving in such areas as race relations, politics, economics, and the question of confidence in our public and private institutions?